According to the Cambridge Dictionary "Ecology is known as the relationships between air, land, water, animals, plants, etc usually of a particular area, or the study of this". Can the internet be best described as an information ecology, personally I beleive yes it can.

The internet is an environment much like what is described in the dictionary although the living organisms are replaced with technological organisations, the media, government agencies and thanks to Web 2.0 and the advancements of social networking, individuals who are able to take and receive information through online relationships.
It is these online relationships that create an environment of sharing both personally and professionally with our peers.
Communication ecology is a mere link to an information ecology. Much like ecology in general it is made up of the relationship between groups within an environment. In an information ecology sense, communication is just one of those small group required to interact with other groups to form an environment.

Evaluating the Web

Having completed a few management courses through OUA I have been reguired to write annotated bibliographies on several occassions, so I felt fairly comfortable writing them as part of the concepts assignment. In saying that I wish I had have looked forward to this module prior to completing the assignment.The Ohio Su tutorial is an excellent tool which shows how to evaluate the entegrity of a website and its reliability by following the 6 main points.
I guess the main point a came away with after completing the tutorial is that all web pages are pushing either ther commercial beliefs if its a business page or personal beleifs if its a blogging or social networking type page. It is essentially up to the reader of the page to determine whether the pages credentials stack up with the information/product/service they are trying to sell.

Here is an annotated bibliography I wrote for my concept assignment-

Facemyer, K.C., 1997, ‘Asynchronicity: Distributed Learning Communities’, Virtual WSU, Washington State University, viewed 31st December 2008. http://www.wsu.edu/vwsu/direction/DirectPapers/Asynchronicity.html


This electronic paper looks at the learning activities of universities and how there teachings can be best described as asynchronous.

In this paper, Facemyer outlines the historical roles of a lecturer and the roles asynchronicity plays in allowing the student to take the information taught by the lecturer and use this in their own time to fulfill their learning objectives.

This paper will help to highlight the concepts outline when used within the context of online learning being just as effective as opposed to learning within a classroom.

The age of this paper is a limitation, so will only be used as a source to argue that, to be able to study in ones own time has allowed opportunities to students irrespective of there circumstances.

This annotation outlines an authors personal opinion on online learning.

I have been fortunate enough through my studies to realise that annotation is a much better form of referencing a web site,reference paper or book than taking a snapshot or extract from the source. I have found by completing an annotation, it does minimise the chance of plagarism.

Boolean searching task

I attempted to search for Alaskan Amber but also added in the word beer, so the search attempt was for ALASKAN AMBER AND BEER. The number of hits had decrease dramatically to 55,200 hits in 0.40 seconds.
The first two hits were for The Alaskan Beer Company who make the beer in question.

I used webcopier to download the site to my PC

the site www.alaskanbeer.com, by sundog media, copyright 2003.

Amber - Alaskan Brewing Company's flagship beer is based on a turn-of-the-century recipe that quenched the thirst of miners during the Klondike Gold Rush. Smooth, richly malty, this altbier goes well with any meal or share it with friends!

The second web site was a blog title Thats This World Over a blog written in reference to Alaskan Amber.
http://thatsthisworldover.wordpress.com/2006/12/03/alaskan-amber-ale/
My all time favorite beer is Alaskan Amber Ale, which I quaff as much as possible when I am in Seattle. I have tried to purchase it on-line and in the stores here, but either it wasn’t available or the shipping costs were too outrageous.

Thanks to this blog I have found a source to have some shipped to Australia.

search engine task

I have always used Google as my primary search engine and found it extremely quick and easy to use, so I was looking forward to seeing is effectiveness compared to another search engine. I used Google to search for Alaskan Amber a beer I found on a recent trip to the US. The search found 3,650,000 results in 0.17 seconds with the first hit being the Alaskam Brewing Company.

TOP 5 RESULTS FROM GOOGLE

1. ALASKAN AMBER :: ALASKAN PALE :: ALASKAN STOUT : BARLEY WINE : ALASKAN IPA : SMOKED PORTER : WINTER ALE : SUMMER ALE ... Click here to read Disclaimer, Alaskan Brewing Company 5429 Shaune Dr., Juneau, Alaska 99801-9540 p (907) 780.5866 ...
www.alaskanbeer.com/ - 6k - Cached - Similar pages -
Gear Store
Amber
Recipes
Our Brew
Fun Stuff
Smoked Porter
FAQ
Our Crew

More results from alaskanbeer.com »

2. Alaskan Brewing Company - Our Brew - Amber

Alaskan Amber is based on a recipe from a turn-of-the-century brewery in the Juneau area. It was voted "Best Beer in the Nation" in the 1988 Great American ...
www.alaskanbeer.com/amber.html - 22k - Cached - Similar pages -
3. Life in Amber: In Amber - Google Books Result
by George O. Poinar - 1992 - Science - 350 pages
Uslnger and Smith (1957) cite reports from the Eskimos about an amber bay and ... According to these authors, in order to obtain amber from Umnak Island, ...
books.google.com.au/books?isbn=0804720010...
4. Plant Resins: Chemistry, Evolution, Ecology, and Ethnobotany - Google Books Result
by Jean H. Langenheim - 2003 - Nature - 586 pages
Using Py-MS, however, Poinar and Haverkamp (1985) supported a close relationship of this Alaskan amber to Agathis-type resin. Poinar (1992a) also noted that ...
books.google.com.au/books?isbn=0881925748...
5. Alaskan Amber - Alaskan Brewing Co. - BeerAdvocate

Alaskan Amber, Altbier style beer from Alaskan Brewing Co. in Juneau, Alaska, beer reviews for Alaskan Amber

I used Corpernicus as the comparision for the search for Alaskan Amber. The search had a total of 68 hits with the first hit being Shopping.com Australia.
TOP 5 RESULTS FROM CORPERNICUS
1.
Alaskan Amber
Buy Alaskan Amber Compare Alaskan Amber prices
Sponsored by: au.Shopping.com/Alaskan+Amber/ [Found on Ads by Google]
2.
Alaskan Amber Reviews
1000s of beer reviews and ratings Catalog the beers you've tried.
Sponsored by: LivingSocial.com [Found on Ads by Yahoo!]
3.
Alaskan Brewing Company - Our Brew - Amb...
Fishing is a way of life in Alaska and inspired the Alaskan Amber label. Click here for the story behind the Alaskan Amber fishing boat. ...
www.alaskanbeer.com/amber.html [Found on Yahoo! Search, Ask.com]
4.
Alaskan Brewing Company
Offering a variety of porters, ales and seasonal beers. ... ALASKAN AMBER :: ALASKAN PALE :: ALASKAN STOUT : BARLEY WINE : ALASKAN IPA : ...
www.alaskanbeer.com/ [Found on Yahoo! Search, Ask.com]
5.
Alaskan Amber - Alaskan Brewing Co. - Be...
Find or write reviews and ratings for Alaskan Amber. ... Poured dark amber color with an average frothy white head that diminished slowly ...
beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/429/1309 [Found on Yahoo! Search, Ask.com]
6.

TO be honest Goggle wins hands down.

Downloading tools / plug-ins Task

Adobe reader, and flash/shockwave player are programs which I tend to use on a frequent basis for work. Training programs for my employees rely on these programs to deliver the on the job training platform we utilise in the automotive industry. I have used all three media player programs at one point of another over the last few years, but always tend to find myself back with Windows media player for some reason. I guess for me its just sticking with the norm.
I have downloaded the bookmark buddy for windows and found it fairly quick to download. I was however a little confused in its usefullness as a tool to improve my computor use, I may hhave to play around with this a bit more to appreciate it.
I clicked on glooton to attempt to download the program. I found myself being redirected to a French website, and knowing my French was very limited I decided to give any attempt to download from there a miss.
Copernis was a litttle easier and was in english (yay), although it did take approx 5 minutes to download. Using as a search engine appears much the same as Google which is my usual search engine.
Pagesucker was an extremely quick program to download taking less that 2 minutes to set up.
As a demo version I was limited to the amount of threads activated to download, which was frustrating as I would have like to have played around and downloaded a major webpage. Personally, I really cant see the benefits of a program like this

Web 2.0

The blinklist homepage and the html version was like chalk and cheese. The html page comes across as a jumble of words that really did not excite ne enough to want to search one of the links. However, the blinklist home page whilst not causing me to jump out of my skin, actually enticed me to at least pick a couple of the pages it listed and at least look at them.

I guess web 2.0 has enabled users of the internet to be apart of the process. Rather than use it for research in much the same way you would use a library, it has brought the user into being an active participant. With web 2.0 we are not so much the researcher but the researched, most current society now lives their live thanks to the advancements web 2.0 brought.

Blogs

I have always thought of Blogs as being a tool for people that have far too much time on their hands to push their thoughts and believes on unsuspecting individuals. Having completed nearly two thirds of this course I am happy to put my hand up and yell from the mountain tops how wrong I am. I have actually enjoyed the process of keeping an online journal as part of our assessment. I now believe Blogging is an exceptionally valuable tool not only for personal experiences but also from a business point of view.

I can see the benefits in my line of work, setting up a blog so as to share information with my employees. Having spent a fair amount of time travelling I am entertaining the idea of posting my experiences. Who knows it may help to improve a fellow travelers experience in the future.
I must say I even find myself searching blogs to help me in my everyday life.

I recently brought my son Guitar Hero World Tour for my son, but was having problems setting it up. I was able to solve my problem by reading a few blogs in relation to the product I brought.
Needless to say I have changed my whole opinion on blogging.